Facebook protest over ‘forbidden’ words in Scrabble dictionary

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Until now an uneasy peace has prevailed between casual Scrabble players and their more serious competitive counterparts but the popularity of internet versions of the board game has caused the two cultures to clash.

Players who use websites such as Facebook have been incensed to discover that official word lists, which are compiled by competitive players, allow proper nouns, archaic terms, foreign words and slang that would have been forbidden when the game was first published in 1949 and may contravene present rules.

“Pernod”, for example, is considered permissible by compilers of the official lists despite being a proper noun